Jeannette Walls: Family and Fiction

The Women Of Ill Repute

Family secrets are now the stuff of tell-all memoirs, thanks largely to Jeannette Walls and her book The Glass Castle. Jeannette turned the book world - and the world in general - on its ear with her account of growing up rootless, homeless and in dire poverty. Jeannette has now moved on to fiction. Hang the Moon is her latest, the story of an intrepid young woman who becomes a bootlegger during Prohibition. We talk about memoirs and memories, truth and fiction, and what it’s like to have Woody Harrelson play your father.

Jeannette Walls is an American author and journalist, widely known as a former gossip columnist for MSNBC until she wrote The Glass Castle, a memoir of her nomadic childhood and family life, that catapulted her onto the NYT bestseller list, where the book has remained for the past 8 years. Her third novel, Hang the Moon, was published in March 2023. Jeannette lives with her husband on a 200 acre ranch in Virginia.

A version of this episode appears in video form on YouTube but sadly we lost connection to Jeannette's video about halfway through.

A transcript of the episode is here.

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